Sometimes we blunder into things by accident. Other times we are looking for something to fill our lives, and don't know what we want to do. Still other times we have a lot going on in our lives and just haven't made room for anything. What's important is to recognize an opportunity when it comes up, even if it's not what you expect. That's what happened to me anyway.
I've been taking a lot of mental notes about what interests me. I've probably spent the last two years floating around, aimless and unfocused. I would float from idea to idea, pulling a bit at the strings, seeing what it could do, finding myself not really enjoying myself, and drifting off to the next one.
One of the floating tangents took me over to the Youtube channel Games Done Quick. I do rather enjoy speedruns. They're a great way to pass the time while learning about the pure skill and dedication that people put into something as wonderful as a video game. Between their main events - AGDQ and SGDQ - the channel posts other content in the form of a "hotfix".
The one that caught my attention was the Gauntlet. I've been looking for longer and longer videos to deal with my poor situation. They're great for drowning out background noise, and sometimes I find unexpected things. The entire gauntlet is around 25 hours long; good for a few days at least.
The gauntlet was a bit surprising. There are a variety of games played per video, and each one is played by someone who hasn't played the game before. The games themselves were generally bad. What's worse, the hosts were giving out save states to make a scenario in a game that could be difficult, horrible, or just plain long.
For the entire first video, I was completely enraptured. How could other people be playing horrible games in such a bizarre way while racing against each other? There were so many games I hadn't played in here, so I started taking down names and doing a bit of research on each one.
Sega Genesis games are my weak spot. I'm sure that I'm so fond of bad games because the quality of games on the Genesis was so wild. You never really knew what you were getting before you started the game. Was it the best game on the system, or was it complete trash? More likely was that it was experimental and somewhere inbetween the two.
I've been keeping a list of all the games I've never seen before that interest me. I thought I'd start with something familiar, but new. I'm always up for new things, even if the novelty doesn't last very long and I end up somewhere else in a few minutes. I've got plenty of time; what else do I have to lose?
The first game I tried was Alisia Dragoon. I died almost immediately, but the second playthrough went very well. It's the kind of game where you have a lot of dumb fun for awhile. The beginning was a bit boring and repetitive, but it seems more about learning the game so you can push forward. The second level was ostensibly a continuation of the first, but instead of traversing a field you would dive into a ruin. There were multiple side paths to take, each with goodies, and I learned very quickly that those goodies were making the game easier.
At the end of stage two there as a giant... ball? Plot happened, the ball floated off, and I had a mission: Survive to fight a wizard that shoots flaming dragons that will probably kill me. I tore across the country side, jumped into an air ship that had eyes, and promptly jumped off after a short stage. I really wanted to see more of the ship creature thing, but that was for another time.
The rest of that journey went into a generic cave, further into a generic lava cave, and I lost on stage 6. The game only has one life, with one or two scattered around, so I expected this to be somewhat difficult.
No problem, let's try again. Explore every nook and cranny, make sure I have all the dragons in line, and I'll beat the game in no time. The third time taught me about how the different dragon minions worked and how powerful lightning upgrades could be. Wonderful; I was improving.
I shot my way up to where I was and past it. The game itself started to become unforgiving, but I figured that was just the game building towards something. The boss of stage 6 took a bit too long to beat though... and it killed me the previous time, so I figured it was just designed a bit poorly. I waltzed into stage 7, spent roughly a minute climing some stairs up to the boss... and had my butt handed to me.
The fourth time would be my last try. The difficulty after stage 6 spiked up so high that it broke my sense of fun. It broke the play conditioning that had led up to that area. In fact, I'd wager that the game itself was designed in such a way to extend playtime by ramping the difficulty up way too far.
I looked for cheat codes just to finish off the game. The game actually has a debug mode that lets you have invincibility, choose what powerups you have, and skip stages. Perfect, I can get back to where I was and try again. Turn on invincibility (which doesn't stop damage, it just prevents you from losing at 0 health) for good measure and see how bad the end of this game actually is.
The boss in the middle of stage 7 is almost the end of the game. There's a difficult platforming section between that boss and stage 8, which didn't appear anywhere else in the game and involved platforms that moved in patterns that would kick you off at the end.
In stage 8, what I thought was the last boss was an even higher difficulty spike. The wizard from earlier had returned, and congratulated me on surviving the journey. The fight was challenging, frustrating, and I learned how to beat it; everything I would want in an arcade style boss. Then the wizard's ball woke up, and...
It was a hunk of meat. Dumb, boring, poor patterns, and a damage sponge. Nothing about this boss was worthwhile, and it had so much health that I spent longer just fighting the thing than I did on the previous stage. The entire lead-up to this epic moment was deflated over the course of a sad, grueling, endurance battle. Blehhhhhhhhhhhhhh! This is boring, give me something better!
It was at this moment I knew. This was a game that I had a lot of fun playing. The music is great, the combat is satisfying in the kind of dumb way that old arcade games used to be, and I had a glimpse into a world that wanted to be more than it was. Up until stage 7 there were a few warts, and the difficulty has some weird spikes and troughs that take balance and twist it up in a wrench, but after that point... I knew.
Alisia Dragoon had my attention. Now it has my interest.
It took 24 hours to figure out what I wanted to do. I sketched out a character related to the heroine, I did a bit of looking into unused content, I even grabbed a debugging device to look at the game in detail. None of that was enough. I wanted more... much more. In fact, this is what I had been looking for more than anything else. I'm going to rip this game apart all the way down to its fabric of existence and rebuild it in a way that brings out all of its untapped potential.
This project is something that's exciting in a way that's hard to describe. It's the kind of feeling that cuts through the fog, opens the skies, and shines a light on something that was left in a bygone era of my life. It's a kind of self-fulling prophecy, motivating itself to happen in a way that's impossible to describe properly. More than anything else, there's an itch I need to scratch.
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